[MARS_James]

I really feel that you have to look at this from two different perspectives when did you decided to compete as a robotics team and when you decided to compete as a FIRST Team. What I mean is that a FIRST Team competes for The Chairmans Award since it is the highest award out there.

In terms of the robot for us it kind of happened on accident to us. In 2005 our rookie year we won an off season event, Mayhem at the Museum. It really invigorated the 12 members for 2006 when we went with a risky design and had a huge boost, we made it to the finals by beating an alliance of tough frc veterans (233, 190, 744).

My freshman year was when we became focused on being a FIRST Robotics Team, with our first team captain graduating the new team captain was NOT a robot builder so his focus was not on the robot and it showed with us receiving the Regional Engineering Inspiration Award, and Regional Chairmans Award in back to back years.

Unfortunately after that year both robots and outreach took a huge drop off after that due to funding and build location but we finally are making the come back to both.